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S3TC For Mesa Is Talked About Some More

Phoronix: S3TC For Mesa Is Talked About Some More

Discussions surrounding S3TC Texture Compression support for mainline Mesa (right now it's an external library) is becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Newer games and OpenGL applications depend upon S3TC support and open-source developers are unable to provide "out of the box" support due to patent concerns...

finally, someone who has a fucking clue!
lawyers will always say "there is a risk" because world is full of assholes who would abuse legal system as they abuse law enforcement system to screw you if they want even if you just standing still. sometimes you just have to take that risk which comes with job. unfortunately, Zack is on corporate job and it's corporate risk which comes first, of course he would say that. but if we talking about public OSS project and there is no detailed public info about that risk - it's just scaremongering and FUD.

say, tomorrow patch would materialise that connects libsquish to mesa. will it be merged ? will libtxc_dxtn have code improvements, new releases and all official freedesktop support ? everyone sure that incorporating that code in mesa and only providing driconf switch ("disabled" by default) is not good enough ? if yes, it's enabled by default when library is present, right ?
maybe external library from non-free repository is not that bad in theory but how it came that way so its support was abandon for ages where it even lost hosting ?

Gordon said that distros now treat mesa as if it were "good enough". i say he's right but it's lesser evil in comparison how they treated it as useless garbage with "glxinfo" being its most useful part. now glxinfo is in separate tarball and mesa is not useless, let's hope they will find balance and hopefully support libtxc_dxtn or libsquish or whatever to render those fucking compressed textures.

Talk to hand, then say that to the FreeType project with a straight face.

You just can't add what amounts to arbitrary restrictions to your software and claim freedom.

The ones adding restrictions is your legislation and patent holders, not developers/submitters. If China decides to ban IM clients that don't spy on their users, will distros remove them because they're now illegal to distribute in some legislations, despite developers placing no restrictions of their own on the software?

Has anybody suggested to Via that maybe the best way they can show they are serious about Open-Source development is to make the S3 patents available to Open-Source developers under an Open-License, or under terms allowing the royalty free usage there-of?